The Redemption of Things: Collecting and Dispersal in German Realism and Modernism by Samuel Frederick

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Redemption of Things: Collecting and Dispersal in German Realism and Modernism by Samuel Frederick Andrea Meyertholen Samuel Frederick. The Redemption of Things: Collecting and Dispersal in German Realism and Modernism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library, 2021. 330 pp. Dust. Junk. Debris. Sludge. Scraps. Waste. These are not materials that we particularly wish to see accumulate around the house or that we ourselves seek to accumulate, let alone preserve and present. Yet such objects are collected, arranged, and showcased in Samuel Frederick's The Redemption of Things. This quietly engaging and eloquent book challenges dominant conceptions about collectability by analyzing the collecting of material things whose immateriality, ephemerality, and presumable undesirability would seem to deter if not defy the very act of collecting. In our efforts to hold on to that which will only slip through our fingers, we ultimately come to terms with the contingency of objects and our own existence. Through close readings of texts, poetry, and film, Frederick develops a compelling argument about the dialectics of gathering and scattering, which navigates the paradoxical logic of restoration through loss to offer greater appreciation for and new insight into the activity of collecting and its role in literature. For Frederick's central argument, modernity begins around 1800, when the confluence of socioeconomic and cultural transformations with new technologies and modes of production destabilized notions of preordained metaphysical classificatory systems and thereby brought about an essential shift in human relations to material objects. To regenerate stability and reestablish meaning amid an increasingly entropic world, new forms of collecting emerged in both private settings and public institutions. From Foucault's The Order of Things and Susan Stewart's On Longing to Susan Crane's Collecting and Historical Consciousness and Peter McIsaac's Museums of Mind, numerous scholars have identified this juncture in and beyond German-speaking culture as formative for reshaping the imperative to collect and order the material world. Frederick does not refute this account but indicates its inability to clarify the paradoxical nature of the collecting process. In its attempts to bring objects close, save them from harm, and create unity, collecting necessarily distances the object from its context and purpose and therefore unavoidably alters, even damages their original states. However, this does not destine the entire enterprise to failure. Instead, Frederick identifies these paradoxes as constitutive of collecting itself, proposing a new theory of "modern" collecting that reconceptualizes its logic and purpose: "To collect is not to reverse this scattering, as the classical, preservationist endeavors pretend to do. Instead of restoring some lost state, collecting shows how things are in the states in which they are found" by preserving them as damaged, decontextualized, and ephemeral. To that end, Frederick focuses on objects not typically regarded as collectable or collection worthy: the dirt, dust, fragments, and fugitive moments eternally on the cusp of decay and dissolution. The book is organized into three parts according to three distinct categories of precarious and marginal things, respectively. Each part contains a set of two case studies that productively compare realist with modernist examples. Prefacing these six case studies is a theoretical chapter in which Frederick orients his theory of collecting with respect to Vilém Flusser, Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger, and Aleida Assmann. Part 1 ("Ephemera") pairs the collecting of moss in Adalbert Stifter's novella "Der Kuss von Sentze" (1866) with that of the experiential instant as spliced together in Oskar Fischinger's film München-Berlin Wanderung (1927). Part 2 ("Catastrophic Detritus") explores the generative potential of collecting flood-borne [End Page 192] debris in Jeremias Gotthelf's Die Wassernot in Emmental (1838) before considering the efforts to resist the erosion of landscape and memory in Max Frisch's Der Mensch erscheint im Holozän (1927). Finally, Part 3 ("Triviality") looks at spaces that contain junk in Gottfried Keller's Der grüne Heinrich (1854–55) and surfaces that collect dust and sand in two crime novels by Friedrich Glauser from 1936. Frederick's deeply researched case studies proceed from careful textual analyses anchored in historical and philosophical contextualization. For example, the chapter on Stifter offers a sophisticated reading of a lesser-known text...